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Blood from an Invisible Wound Reflections on focus experience at the
Los Angeles Coroners’ Office I
stepped away from our doctor now slicing our patient’s organs and placing
remnants in a small jar. I found a
stool to sit on and rested my temples in the palms of my hands. I knew that I would never be able to
organize my thoughts into a coherent explanation that explained my feelings
and what they meant. I felt like a
flash fire had ignited and emblazoned my neurons in an intense heat the
spread across my mind but would quickly burn out and fade leaving only
charred remnants. Yet I vowed to
record them. I
was excited to spend the morning at the coroners. I enjoy new experiences. We had planned to go the week before, but
scheduling conflicts hindered our plans.
Several weeks earlier we had watched a documentary about people who
die alone and the role of the coroners to uncover their identities. The accumulated anticipation had created a
fairly solid picture of what I expected.
It is interesting how we always have expectations about the
future. Does it make us more
comfortable to prepare for possible scenarios and circumstances that might
arise? We seem to believe that maybe
if we think about an event before hand we will be less shocked and somehow
more prepared. I
imagined a small group of doctors huddling over a body in a very cold room
surrounded by sliding metal drawers for bodies that you often see in
movies. The autopsy itself I imagined
was a tedious and time consuming dissection in which the doctors meticulously
uncovered every possible process that ever went wrong. This was not the case. The
day started off normally. I did not
feel nervous. I had seen surgeries and
had spent countless hours working on cadavers. How could this be any different? We carpooled over to the old looking brick
building and were told to go up to the third floor to sign paper work. Afterwards we were taken down into the
basement to get suited up. It was
almost like a full biohazard outfit.
Nearly our entire bodies were covered with fabric, except for our faces
which were partially covered by a TB mask that made it a little difficult to
breathe. When we were ready, a doctor
came in and told us that we would watch him work through a case. We
followed him down the hall and I walked past him as he stopped to pull out an
x-ray. There in the hallway, lying on
a metal table was an African American man with his head tilted back and his
eyes and mouth partially open. His
lower body was covered with a thin blanket, although his genitals were
exposed and there was a small bullet wound in his abdomen. Lying next to him was an infant, in a
somewhat unnatural position, with a blanket covering its body. This
image hit me like a physical blow to my stomach. Visions flooded my mind. I imagined him fighting with his spouse and
shaking his child to death before he was killed in a police shootout. Father and child were reunited in body if
not in mind in the hallway of the coroner’s. When the doctor finished
discussing the x-rays that showed bullets embedded in corpses, I asked him
what happened to the two bodies lying in front of us. He looked down as if seeing them for the
first time. His expression seemed to
shift back and forth between calmness and indifference. All he knew was that the baby and man were
unrelated and just happened to be sharing the same table to conserve space.
For some reason this fact dulled my emotional reaction. It dissolved the images I imagined of them
when they were alive, and they became deader to me. Sometime
during the doctor’s explanation a fellow medical student found her way to my
side, and her hands gripped my arm.
This very human reaction inspired a comforting feeling. It interrupted the cycle of my own thoughts
and feelings and made me realize that there are other people struggling with
the same things. It reminded me that
people depend on me for support and emotional stability. I felt like I had grown psychic tentacles
that reached out and grounded me in reality.
Walking
into the autopsy room was like suddenly becoming lucid in the middle of a
dream. My mind struggled with the
reality of the situation. There were
four naked bodies lying on their backs in various stages of dissection. One man’s chest was being cracked open with
large hedge clippers, another man’s cranium was being opened with a circular
saw, another’s organs were being removed with a kitchen knife. Our
patient was lying naked in a disturbingly peaceful position on a metal
table. It appeared as if her life had
been paused. She seemed very much
alive but was not breathing. This
might seem like an oxymoron, yet my emotional brain told me she was alive and
my logical brain was struggling to convince me that she was not. She was an Asian female with a skinny body,
nearly emaciated. Her head was tilted
back and up slightly. Her eyes were
closed and her limbs had the crooked stiff appearance of rigor mortise. All
that was running through my mind were images of her as a person. First, a vague image of her walking down
the street, and going to work. As the
doctor told us more about her life and condition more specific images filled
my head. She was bipolar and appeared
to have overdosed on her medication.
They had acquired an apparent suicide note. It was solemnly passed from person to
person until I suddenly found it in my hands.
Reading the note was like a blow to my stomach. I could feel her pain; it was my pain:
confusion, and suffering, and cycling endless thoughts, and loneliness, and
lost love. Her body represented this
pain. She became alive in my mind. I knew who she was. I saw her screaming at her lover, then
later apologizing profusely. I saw her
staring blankly out the window at one moment and then passionately
experiencing the world during the next.
Image upon image cascaded in my mind’s eye like a filmstrip. These
feelings are difficult to put into words.
It was very much like a dream:
an event is happening which seems separated from your emotional
reaction. There is also a sensation of
watching something from a distance, but having the feeling of being right in
the heart of it. The
passage of time began to speed up, possibly in compensation for when it
slowed. The lab tech methodically and
efficiently opened her chest and removed all of her organs. This was done in a practiced, machine-like
way. The name of the game was
efficiency. Blood was scooped out with
a ladle; the liver was cut with a kitchen knife. I kept thinking how accurately movies
actually portrayed blood, yet how fake I often believed it was. It came in various colors and consistencies
ranging from a thin dark maroon to a viscous intense bright red. I was asking the same kind of questions I
do when I am dreaming: “Why are there kitchen utensils? That makes no sense. That blood looks really fake. This is very illogical. I am obviously dreaming.” This discontinuity within my mind made me
feel like vomiting. I felt
lightheaded. My skin was clammy and my
mouth was filled with saliva.
Apparently these are all aspects of the sympathetic response. Did my mind think I was in danger somehow? Other
bodies were wheeled in as I watched this woman being disemboweled. A young white man with an unshaven face and
scruffy hair appeared to have been in motorcycle accident. His ankles were broken, he had huge
abrasions along the side of his body and his head was cracked and had
numerous staples holding it closed. It
was a sobering picture. I tried to
bring my attention back to our patient. When
the organs were removed the tech sliced and peeled her scalp off her head
such that it was lying over her face.
As I attempt to recollect this image I question its reality. It looks just like you would imagine if you
reached up, grabbed the skin on the top of your head and pulled it down over
your face. A circular saw was then
used to remove a portion of her skull and subsequently her brain. A
sense of awe came over me as I stared at this strange organ. I saw the remnants or her being and soul
left as imprints in neurons like foot prints in sand. Without the energy of the body to maintain
the integrity of the neurons, they quickly degenerate. Events were flying by. Each new intense thought was like a wave
slamming against the hull of my consciousness. Some of my brain functions were shutting
off, and I had a nidus of a powerful headache forming. I found a stool to sit in and rested my
temples in the palms of my hands. I
felt my self sinking; I turned face up and looked up at the surface of my
consciousness and take in the thoughts I saw.
I tried to grasp them. Life
and death are real. People die. The rumors are true. Death is whisked away, whether at the
coroner’s or in our society. Everyone
knows it is only for old people and television. But everyone is wrong and we know it! We choose to live in a self-constructed
illusion. Death threatens to shatter
our construction. Life is as delicate
as our illusion. It is subjective. The only absolute truth is a continuum of
energy that permeates life and death; that permeates everything; that is
everything. People die yet people
live. This woman died yet her image
and story live within my mind. The
bodies will be burned and the energy will be incorporated into new life. These concepts seem so fundamental when
death bluntly confronted me, but they gradually fade as daily life reinserts
itself into the forefront of my mind.
The daily struggle of incorporating massive amounts of knowledge
leaves little room for contemplation and reflection. The concepts of time… life…. death… energy…
people…. emotions… struggle…. suffering… compassion bounce energetically
through my mind trying to find their place in some bigger understanding,
puzzle pieces in some bigger picture.
Time flows through my hands like blood from an invisible wound. I write
these thoughts to give them some meaning, some continuity, some permanence in
a time when for a better or worse I am being transformed into a new
entity. An entity meant to reduce the
suffering of others, yet an entity that seems more disconnected from that
very suffering which it wishes to relieve. Michael is a
member of the Class of 2009 |
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